Thursday, March 25, 2010

A recidivist El Inglés returns to the subject of crime with the first of a series of essays about the fallacies commonly held by Western government law enforcement officials.

I have written before on the subject of crime, in parts 1, 2, and 3 of “On the Failure of Law Enforcement”. Here, I must return to the subject because of the woeful lack of comprehension of what crime is, what can be done about it and what cannot, and the significance of crime for communities suffering its ill-effects. The problems that Muslims pose for Europe are many and varied, but crime is one of the most severe. This will be the first in a (hopefully) ongoing series of short essays exploring some of the most common fallacies on the subject.

Some Fallacies On the Subject of Crime:The Tiny Minority Fallacy

by El Inglés

The Enemy Within?

In February 2010, Albert van den Bosch, the mayor of Zaltbommel, a municipality in the Netherlands, referred to Moroccan youth therein as the ‘enemy within’. Presumably inspired by the stone-cold courage and verbal brilliance of the man they call Geert Wilders, he asked why the Netherlands committed forces to Afghanistan when the threat was on the home front? Needless to say, this is fairly strong stuff, and was heartwarming in the extreme for this observer.

Unfortunately for us, the mayor then managed to blunt the impact of his otherwise forceful comments. He informed us, with woeful predictability, that the vast majority of the Moroccans were law-abiding, and that the problem lay in a group of just 50 youths. Twenty of the group were apparently hard-core criminals, with the other thirty just ‘copying’ them. This tiny minority of the population was a great problem, but the good mayor was keen to impress upon us that, overwhelmingly, the Moroccans themselves were not causing problems. After all, were the great majority not law-abiding?

I do not doubt that the mayor of Zaltbommel means well. Furthermore, he has already shown more courage, and a greater appreciation of the dire straits his locality finds itself in, than most would be able to in similar circumstances. However, he is still stumbling around in the dark in one important regard, which I shall explain here.

The Tiny Minority Fallacy

There is a particular stupefaction that runs so deep, is so comforting, and is so intuitively appealing, that it contaminates even otherwise fine minds on the subject of crime. This stupefaction is now so common, and has become such a mindlessly-repeated mantra, that it deserves a name of its own. I propose to call it the Tiny Minority Fallacy. More than perhaps any other idea, The Tiny Minority Fallacy enables people to turn a blind eye to hideous damage being inflicted upon themselves and their countries. It must be exposed and overturned for that reason.

That a given problem caused by a given ethnic/religious group in a given society is only committed by a ‘tiny minority’ of that group.

2.

The problem, though unpleasant, is therefore essentially manageable, at least in principle.

3.

It is unfair to blame the problematic group as a whole, as the vast majority of the members of that group are not engaging in the unfortunate behaviour in question.

4.

Whether one blames the group as a whole or not, it is unfair to take any type of action against it as a whole, as such collective action/punishment will affect many innocent people.

The Tiny Minority Fallacy is a peculiar mix of toxic politically correct nonsense and genuinely mistaken analysis. There is nothing I can do about the first of these two problems, but I am confident that I can clear up the second. We will continue to take the Dutch town of Zaltbommel as our analytic focus, as it and its mayor’s implicit statement of the Tiny Minority Fallacy make it perfect for the purposes of exposition.

In Zaltbommel

I do not have a demographic breakdown of the Moroccan population of Zaltbommel to hand, but some reasonable assumptions will enable us to get the ball rolling here. It is 1,000-strong. Let us therefore assume that it has 500 males and 500 females. It will have a younger age pyramid by some margin than the Dutch themselves, with a relatively low median age. We will assume for the sake of argument that 50% of the population is 30 or above (i.e. that the median age is 30), that 30% of the population is in the age range 0-14, and that the remaining 20% of the population is in the age range 15-29.

When we talk about the crime of Muslim populations and the threat this crime poses to European countries, we are not talking about people driving 38mph in a 30mph zone. Nor are we talking about those who urinate in public or litter. Anti-social and unpleasant though all these things may be (whether their perpetrators are Moroccan, Dutch, or anything else), they do not represent threats to the fabric of European society, either at current or conceivable future levels. No, the crime that we are most concerned about in this regard consists of a mix of violent crime (e.g. assault), property crime (e.g. car theft), financial crime (e.g. credit card fraud) and sexual crime (e.g. rape). It is a general truth of human affairs that this sort of crime is overwhelmingly perpetrated by young males. I will assume here that the enemies within referred to by the mayor are all in the 15-29 age category. The article about Zaltbommel mentions ‘teenage criminals’, but I find it difficult to believe that those in their 20s are not contributing to the problem. Either way, this assumption will certainly not be hopelessly inaccurate, and should therefore serve us reasonably well in the following analysis.

Let us consider what significance, if any, the mayor of Zaltbommel’s personal assertion of the Tiny Minority Fallacy has. In our model, those Moroccans who are not ‘enemies within’ (though they may still be criminal to some extent) in Zaltbommel consist of: a) the 500 females there, old and young; b) the 150 males under the age of 14, and; c) the 250 males of ages 30+. This leaves a group of 100 males, between the ages of 15 and 29, half of whom (our original 50) are criminal enough to be referred to by their own mayor as the enemy within.

I do not know what the Moroccan population of the Netherlands was like in the 1980s, and I do not know what it will be like in the 2040s. This caveat notwithstanding, we can say the following: if the Moroccan population of Zaltbommel retains its characteristics in the regards we are interested in the long term, one half of all males will go through an extended phase of vicious, violent, tribal delinquency and criminality, severe enough for their own mayor to identify them as enemies of the Netherlands. Given that every male under the age of 15 (barring untimely death) will pass through this 15-29 category, and that all those who make it through it alive will end up in the older age categories, fully 50% of the male Moroccan population is either being funnelled through this group, will soon be funnelled through it, or has already been funnelled through it.

Let us now consider the significance of this. We have three ‘life stages’ for male Moroccans: early (0-14 years), middle (15-29 years), and late (30+ years). What can be said about these three stages?

Early

a)

Half of all male Moroccans are being socialized, intentionally or otherwise, in such a fashion as to turn them into ‘enemies within’, i.e. not just criminals, but serious, dedicated, vicious recidivists.

b)

At least half of all male Moroccans (the enemies-within-to-be and perhaps others too) are being imbued, in whatever fashion, with a complete contempt for the Dutch, their laws, and their country.

c)

At least half of all male Moroccans are being imbued with such contempt for mainstream society and what it values that we can safely assume they obtain virtually no meaningful educational or professional qualifications of use in a modern economy.

Middle

a)

Half of all Moroccan males are now ‘enemies within’.

b)

Half of all Moroccan males are entrenching ever deeper, on a daily basis, the contempt for Dutch society already inculcated in them.

c)

Some substantial fraction of these will go to prison for a time, disrupting, perhaps permanently, the meagre educational or professional achievements they may have been obtaining, and rendering them not only skill-free, but deeply unattractive to serious employers when they get out of prison.

Late

a)

Half of all Moroccan males are now ex-’enemies within’, with all that implies, i.e. criminal records, unemployability, lack of any useful skills or education.

b)

These ex-’enemies within’ will now be having families and imbuing, to some extent, their children with their values, thereby completing the cycle.

In this preliminary analysis, half of all Moroccan males are being funnelled through this ‘system’. This is what it means for a ‘tiny minority’ of Moroccans to be enemies within — that the Moroccan community of Zaltbommel is so violent, so tribal, so unproductive, so uncivilized, and so completely incapable of making any meaningful contribution to the Netherlands that its males would, collectively, destroy every good thing within it if it were within their power to do so. Is this a state of affairs that can be shrugged off as a minor problem, or one to be solved by introducing a few new policies? I would suggest not.

The Fallacy Explained

The basic problem with the Tiny Minority Fallacy is that healthy societies can only remain healthy if the fraction of their populations consisting of seriously criminal types is an exceptionally tiny minority. The ‘tiny minority’ of 5% criminals in Zaltbommel is indicative of a Moroccan sub-society that would instantly collapse into anarchy if not held up by the long-suffering Dutch people it damaged and depraved. The even tinier minority of a 1% criminal population would still mean, in our example, that one in ten males (as opposed to one in two) in the 15-29 age group was preying on and destroying the people and wealth around them, a state of affairs completely incompatible with a civilized and prosperous society.

Those who are not yet convinced should consider Britain. Britain has a population of 61 million people, 1% of which is 610,000 (about six times as large as the combat strength of the British Army). If 610,000 males in the 15-29 age category, of whatever background, were such savages and criminals as to be labelled the enemy within by British political figures, what sort of country would we be living in? Surely one that does not much resemble Britain as it is today. If we liken the Moroccan community of Zaltbommel to Britain, then it contains what would, in the UK, be 3,050,000 ‘enemies within’ running riot, i.e. our original 5% of the whole. Does that put things in perspective a little? Of course, the burden of Moroccan crime is borne largely by the Dutch themselves rather than by other Moroccans, which is to say that the ill effects of their criminality spill outside their own group. This caveat notwithstanding, the comparison with Britain is still useful in illustrating the brute size of the pathological Moroccan population.

The Tiny Minority Fallacy is as much use in understanding crime as it is in understanding cancer. I weigh about 85kg, 5% of which is 4.25kg. If my doctor told me I had cancer of the bowel, lungs, and brain but that the total weight of all tumorous tissue in my body was no more than 4.25kg and that there was therefore no particular cause for alarm, I would find a different doctor. To imply that cancer needs to be something other than a tiny minority of one’s body weight before it constitutes an existential threat would be to misunderstand cancer. So it is with crime and criminals.

All personal and property crimes are committed by only a tiny minority of the population of any given country. What fraction of the population of South Africa engages in carjacking, or murder? What fraction of the population of Iraq cuts women’s throats for wearing jeans? What fraction of the population of Mexico is involved in that country’s vicious drug wars? Only tiny minorities of the populations of these countries are engaged in these crimes, yet their very futures as countries are significantly dependent on whether these and other similar types of crime can be reduced. Those who apply the ‘tiny minority’ argument should ask themselves why anyone cares about serious crime at all. It is all committed by tiny minorities, everywhere and always.

It bears saying again that the Tiny Minority Fallacy is fallacious because it implicitly assumes that, in a healthy and functional society, anything other than the tiniest minority could be committing serious crime. This is the core misunderstanding. It will avail the Dutch little to observe that 50-year old Moroccan women are not beating people up on the streets of Zaltbommel. This observation, while undoubtedly true, fails to engage with the meat of the problem. Moroccan males are to the Netherlands what nerve gas is to the human body — a little goes a long way, and its effects are not benign. And given that Moroccan males are not some minor excrescence on the face of the Moroccan population of the Netherlands, but one biological half of an indivisible whole, one must observe that the Moroccans, tout court, are the problem and must be treated as such.

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comments:

I call it the Tiny Minority Gambit. It is used to deflect criticism of a group, there culture, habits, and ideology...by attempting to assert that the generalization is too broad. The ultimate Tiny Minority Gambit is the Lone Crazyman (individual)...recently used in the Col Hassan Foot Hood massacre case (just one recent example). As if there is no connection to be made with a broader pattern of Jihad within Islam (and the Ummah).

The Left also only allows for the use of the Tiny Minority Gambit in protection of favored minority groups.

As an illustration, you could use the Tiny Minority Gambit to assert that the violence against blacks in the US South, like the Emmit Till case or the 3000 or so lynchings, were only carried out by a Tiny Minority of Southern Whites.

However that will be rejected out of hand, by Leftists.

Broad condemnation of certain groups, whites, Europeans, Christians, American Southerners, males, and so on and so forth is the modus operandi of the Left and a gaggle of minority groups and other peoples around the globe.

The imperialists, capitalists, blue eyed bankers, racists, and so on and so forth.

Once you understand those dynamics, then you can see how the game has been played....and move to counter it.

Who knows, could very well be that at some stage in the future, provided that anti-immigration political parties ascend to government positions in Europe, that legislations are introduced that prohibits non-westerners of having babies. The next superpower to be China has already a one child policy in place for their citizens maybe the Europeans in the future will take it one step further?

If they did, the case with huge non-loyal immigrant populations would cease to be a problem and it would eventually completely disappear within 3 – 4 generations. It would also eliminate the immense logistical problems involved in forceful repatriation.

"Could very well be that at some stage in the future, provided that anti-immigration political parties ascend to government positions in Europe, that legislations are introduced that prohibits non-westerners of having babies."

It has already been done. In the XIXth century, a dictator in Paraguay forbade breeding between Whites, and forced them by law to marry Indians. History, apparently, has not recorded the results.

Okey,so bear with me now. This is just a test. If it fails completely, feel free to remove it. I'm now going to try post my first url the way you want us to do it. If I succeed it won't be completely off topic. There is islam in it. Well, a bit. Sort of. If it works, enjoy it! :)

How exactly does passing a law stop people from having babies? It's one of the most fundamental human instincts. You have to really work hard to kill it. The poorer people are, the harder it is.

You would have to apply a lot of force, regardless. Probably simply just to start a war of extermination with concentration camps - it might end up that way anyway.

Anyway it's funny this gets posted today. Yesterday I come home to find a note on my door from the leasing office, about how there was a robbery at knifepoint in the parking lot just outside my window, but nobody should panic, these things happen in all communities, report incidents to the police, blah blah blah.

I am sorely tempted to go give them a piece of my mind, but my general policy for the past few years has been to avoid making waves, because they tend not to accomplish much.

Sigh! I don't know what I do wrong but I'm not surprised. I'm not computer savvy and often fails with stuff like this. Please remove my failed attempts. I'll have to do without posting links in the future.

Rollory, if I was the police there, I would advice people to buy guns. Anyway, about kids, I agree, you can't just force people to not have kids. You just have to make the choice of having kids expensive enough for them. But the poor have more kids not because they are poor, it's because they get welfare for it, while middle class, for example, are neither too rich to have lots of kids, nor poor enough to get welfare. If the choices are having kids and starving to death or not have kids, then people won't have as many kids. If the choices are working to death or having kids...

You don't need to force others not to have kids - there's a reason why immigrants to Europe have more kids here a lot of times than in their home countries.

As bad as this may sound, this article does give me more hope about the chances the West has of surviving. If a small group of individuals, only 1-5% of a population can effect such negative changes, how much effect can an equal percentage of peoples working against them accomplish?

@rebelliousvanilla I completely agree with you. Get any weapons, modern or ancient, and be willing to use them and criminals will leave you alone.

As for the Whites not breeding, there is a legal way to do it when you have the police in force the law and are willing to kill any baby that breaks it by right of parentage. Not pretty, but there it is.

RV - this is a DC suburb. One of the counties with the highest median income in the nation. Plenty of government contractors and rich liberals. Also very tax-happy. Talking about nasty scary things like buying guns just isn't acceptable. Mentioning the Hispanics hanging around would be a serious faux pas. Asking why no physical description of the assailants was provided would be an invitation to prejudice.

Me, I have what I need already.

Thorkell, enforcing the law in the manner you describe would very quickly take it out of the law enforcment realm and into guerrilla war at the very least, probably with a good bit of support from those less convinced of the primacy of racially based judgements and discrimination.

Rollory, you're right, about that greating Guerrilla war and such, if the goal was law enforcement by the people. I was speaking along the lines of self-defence. A man or woman openly carrying a weapon is much less likely to be attacked. That's all I was driving at. Plus, if you are attacked, you're ready and able to defend yourself with extreme effency.

If you use the "tiny minority" fallacy on a historical scale you could completely excuse whole regimes of their actions. The two most obvious are National Socialist Germany and Communist Russia. Only tiny minorities in both regimes perpetrated heinous acts against their enemies whether it was government policy or not. So how can you condem all Nazi's and Communists for the actions of a tiny minority? See, the tiny minority polemic works in every situation.

The often used argument by appeasers is that you can't "generalize". Which implies all generalizations are illegitimate, but is a self defeating argument because to say all generaliztions are illegitimate is a generalization.

We need more essays like this posted in the comments section of adversarial websites to make them squirm a little.

Crime and order are assymetrical. It takes a tiny minority of wrong-doers to wreak havoc upon a community. It takes an overwhelming majority of people abiding by the (mostly unwritten) rules to keep a human group peaceful.

This obsession about "majority" stems from two false premises : the democratic illusion, which makes people think that all social effects are governed by the same formal rule as elections ; and the growing prevalence of egotistical values, which make a sin out of "generalisation".

As long as a single individual does not conform to an existing common pattern of behaviour, it is forbidden to suggest that a pattern even exists.

This would infringe upon the "human rights" of the dissenting individual and "stigmatise" him.

Thorkell, this is why if you were a leader you would be overthrown, while I'd impose my agenda and not be overthrown. You see, what you would do is barbaric and neither side would want to either be a baby killer or have their babies killed. That's now how you do it. It's the same thing as the jus primae noctis/droit de seigneur. This didn't exist for the simple reason that having a law that makes it available for the lord to rape a woman on her wedding night would make people revolt and kill him. On the other hand, him just kidnapping and raping a woman that he founds appealing wouldn't have that result. In the same sense, you're proposing a confrontational way of handling a thing that can be solved with an indirect measure, which is making it economically stupid for them to reproduce by removing welfare and adding tax deductions for children of married parents. This would shift the scales a lot towards our side in the reproduction department. Abolish foreign aid so that you don't subsdizie others to reproduce and so on. These are easy to implement, non-confrontational measures. If they do something, they would also be the aggressors, not you. It's like chess(game at which I am brilliant). :)

Rebelliousvanilla, I'm not sure where you're picking up your ideas about my style of government, but honestly any theoretical government I would run would be completely different from what you say I would have.

I think where you get the baby killer thing is from my explanation of how that law preventing Whites from breeding with other Whites could be enforced. I in now way support that action. Nor do I in any way support jus primae noctic, so I can't say that would ever be an issue. I recognize the special bonds of marriage and see it as a duty to respect them. I don't get where your getting my advocating rape or the things about foreign aid or welfare stuff cause I didn't talk about that here. If you're referring to the 3/25 article about economics that I have on my blog, I'm afraid you didn't get the ideas I was trying to share and would be happy to discuss that on my blog page.

Rather, any type of government I would run would be based on the style of the Norse during the Viking age and before. Families decide things for themselves, which then send a representative to the local Althing (usually the head of the house) to give their position on political issues. It's very close to the people, with few legal restrictions, and relies on citizens to agree to the laws they live under directly and then holding them to it. I will admit not having a problem with Trial by Combat if that is how people wanted to solve their problems, but that is a side issue. I find it doubtful that I would be overthrown in such a government, as there isn't really anyone to over throw, since the leader of the Althing is elected then and there, and the Head of House (which ultimately is a joint position of the husband and wife of the house in equal parts) is not likely to be overthrown by their children.

If you consider this barbaric, I accept the title. The "Barbarians" like the Germanic, Scandinavian, and Celtic tribes had some of the richest and most equal cultures seen not only in the West, but in the world.

I’ll just add a quick comment to the law forbidding non-western immigrants of having babies’ scenario. I don’t think that it would be that hard to control provided there was willingness by the countries involved to enforce it. An ultimatum would be given to non-westerners, you can’t have babies in our countries, but feel free to return to your native countries and procreate to your hearts delight.

However if they still went ahead and fell pregnant in Europe, it would automatically lead to deportation. And I don’t think it would be that hard to detect violations of this law. If one all of a sudden spotted numerous immigrant infants in prams all over the city, or immigrant women sporting extra large bellies it would be safe to assume that such violations had occurred.

Like I mentioned in my first reply on this thread, China introduced the one child policy without causing a revolt in that country, and it certainly had an effect in slowing down the population growth.

Thorkell, I thought you meant that you will kill the babies of non-Europeans if they have too many of them(I thought you are replying to that question about how do you prevent people from having kids). I didn't say that you are advocating rape, I just made a parallel in between how plain idiotic as a policy is to kill a person's child because they had too many with the myth of the droits of the seignieur when the lord could just rape any woman he wanted without pissing off everyone with that law.

EV, I don't take debates personally, even if I have ad hominems coming my way(which wasn't the case, but I just reply to them and leave it all behind). And even if I am an atheist and we don't agree on Christianity, this doesn't mean that you are on the same side as the Muslims to me. lol

Just as I never advocated making gas chambers fashionable again, you just didn't get my position.

This essay makes two exceptionally important points. The first has already been brought to light: Namely, the fallacy of "The Tiny Minority". It should be all too apparent that this same argument is used with respect to terrorism as well.

Supposedly, it is only a "Tiny Minority" of Muslims who are committing the terrorist acts. This argument seemingly absolves a vast majority of Muslims from any responsibility regarding how their zakat directly funds that terrorism and does so − without any qualifications or ameliorating conditions − in the name of Islam.

Buried in this article is another, far more controversial and thorny issue.

Crime, in at least some respects, is a form of Collective Punishment. An amoral criminal element within society that chooses to ignore or deny any work ethic and, instead, derive its sustenance through an arbitrary levy − by way of violent predation upon the larger group of law abiding citizens − are effectively imposing a form of Collective Punishment against those who elect to comply with the laws that are in place.

An extended form of this argument could be framed to indicate that the Black crime rate in America is some form of Collective Punishment imposed against White society for − at a previous time in history − having enslaved and, subsequently, discriminated against the Black minority. That this model falls to pieces when the frequency of Black-on-Black crime is brought to bear is something that is even less often discussed.

Far more cogent is the notion that Islam is imposing Collective Punishment upon dar al harb by way of terrorism and extraction of jizya in the form of welfare and unwarranted tax exemptions granted Islamic organizations that have been allowed to function within Western societies.

Islam is rife with examples of Collective Punishment (e.g., its policy of Abject Gender Apartheid and the entire concept of dhimmitude), but few of them are so dire or cruel than its practice of terrorism. The “Tiny Minority” argument − so favored by Muslims and their apologists − is used to delink Islam, not just from terrorism, but also the monstrous crime rates that seem to accompany Islamic colonization wherever it occurs.

All of this beggars the question of whether it is valid or even morally sustainable to deny that Islam practices Collective Punishment at a level heretofore unknown in modern human history. The large scale patterns of Islamic terrorism and crime both conform to a well established and entrenched policy of predation upon non-Muslim cultures that persists this day.

Such an inference then brings us to the discomforting conclusion that, in order to combat Islam’s predation upon all non-Muslim cultures, it may be necessary or even obligatory to impose Collective Punishment in return. The West has encountered this necessity many times in past global conflicts and there is no compelling reason why it should not be brought to bear against Islam’s openly declared war upon the non-Muslim world.

Call it fighting fire with fire or repayment of Islam in its own coin. Whatever name you give it, the necessity − as Lieutenant Colonel Allen West (US Army, Retired) so often notes − of making Islam’s reality our own refuses to be ignored.